Explaining Egyptian Accents

“Mom, you’ve lived in America for 25 years, why do you keep calling it beanut putter???”

I am going to preface this by saying that our Egyptian parents, no matter how thick their accents, need to be given major credit for their amazing bilingual brains. You try moving to another country where almost no one speaks your native language and see how well you do.

Many of you with immigrant parents (or if you yourself are an immigrant) may have wondered things like “Why do people have accents?” or “When will their/my accent go away?” Well, to answer these questions, we have to go back to the beginning… to when you were a baby.

Human infants are born with the phenomenal ability to distinguish every single possible sound of every single language on earth (babies are actually geniuses; in case you didn’t know).

However, each language only contains a small set of the possible sound variants that a human can produce (like how we don’t have those throat-y sounds or clicks in English). The sounds in a language that are combined to make an actual word are known as the phonemic inventory of that language (such as how the sounds C-A-T combine to make the word “cat,” or how the 3-ai-n combine in Arabic to make “3ain,” the Arabic word for “eye).

Because there’s no real reason to need to know every single sound when you only need a few of them to effectively communicate in your native language, the infant brain does something amazing; it weeds out all the sounds it doesn’t need to just the ones used in the language(s) it’s exposed to in the first 10–12 months or so, in order to be able to focus on how to manipulate these sounds into a language.

It is also important to note that there may be other sounds that are used by speakers in a language, but that do NOT change the meaning of the word. This is called a phonetic inventory.

Why is this important? Because it is the differences between phonemic and phonetic inventories between languages that lead to what we call “accents.”

So, let’s just go over what we learned shall we? A Phonemic Inventory are all of the different sounds used in a language. A Phonetic Inventory on the other hand are the different sounds in a language that can be used in a word but not change the meaning.

Now, let’s go back to the classic b/p mix-up that is often the butt of many Egyptian-Americans’ jokes. In English, both /b/ and /p/ are phonemes. This means that substituting either one in a word can change the meaning of the word. For example, if we take the word “bear” (a large furry animal) and change the /b/ to a /p/, we get the word “pear,” (a delicious pomaceous fruit).

However, in Arabic, there is no instance in which changing a /b/ to a /p/ changes the meaning of the word, therefore, it is not a phoneme, but rather a phonetic variant or allophone (yay more linguistics words).

So for example, if you say “hapipi” in Arabic, instead of “habibi,” since /p/ is not a phoneme in Arabic, you’re not changing the actual meaning of the word, you’re just saying it funny.

In addition to which sounds themselves are used in a language, there are also really complicated sets of rules that determine when and where sounds can or can’t be used in a word. For example, in English, it’s perfectly okay to have a /b/ next to an /r/ at the beginning of a word, like in “bread.” In Arabic, however, that violates the “rules.” This is why an Arabic-speaker trying to say “bread” may add a vowel in between the /b/ and the /r/ (conforming to the rules of Arabic), resulting in something that may sound like “beread.”

With all that being said, it essentially comes down to this: language is really complicated. However, our brains are so amazing that we can take all these intricate rules learned from birth, that we’re not even consciously aware of and use them to make our mouths move in a way for others to understand us.

As for “when will my/their accent go away?” the answer is simply never, because as no two people speak exactly the same, everyone has an accent. Even you.